This relates to integrated circuits and, more particularly, to programmable integrated circuits in a hardware acceleration platform.
Programmable integrated circuits are a type of integrated circuit that can be programmed by a user to implement a desired custom logic function. In a typical scenario, a logic designer uses computer-aided design tools to design a custom logic circuit. When the design process is complete, the computer-aided design tools generate configuration data. The configuration data is loaded into memory elements on a programmable integrated circuit to configure the device to perform the functions of the custom logic circuit.
Programmable devices may be used for co-processing in big-data, fast-data, or high performance compute (HPC) applications. For example, programmable devices may be used in application acceleration tasks in a data center and may be reprogrammed during data center operation to perform different tasks. By offloading computationally intensive tasks from a host processor to highly-parallel acceleration resources on a programmable device (sometimes referred to as a co-processor or an acceleration processor), the host processor is freed up to perform other critical processing tasks. The use of programmable devices as hardware accelerators can therefore help deliver improved speeds, latency, power efficiency, and flexibility for end-to-end cloud computing, networking, storage, artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, virtual reality, augmented reality, gaming, and other data-centric applications.
It is within this context that the embodiments described herein arise.